Word: helix
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...have never seen Francis Crick in a modest mood." James Watson's mischievous opening line of The Double Helix raised many eyebrows at the time, but even Crick wouldn't quarrel with it now. Still brash and outspoken at 86, even without the booming laugh that once echoed through Cambridge's Cavendish lab, Crick has no reason for modesty. In the years since their discovery of the double helix, Crick, unlike Watson, has continued to do significant research, mostly by pondering big--and often controversial--theoretical questions rather than by toiling in the lab. Says his longtime colleague and fellow...
...Rosalind Franklin? The story of her life is short, tragically so, but it doesn't lack for tellers. Was she difficult Rosy, the Cruella De Vil of The Double Helix, who nearly knocked Watson's block off? Was she Dr. R.E. Franklin, the humble supporting player whom Watson and Crick thanked in the second-to-last sentence of their famous article in Nature? Or was she Franklin the feminist icon, the tormented genius who was cheated out of biochemistry's ultimate prize...
...images of crystallized DNA that anyone had ever obtained. She discovered and photographed the hydrated B form of DNA, and she established, crucially, that DNA's structure depended on an external backbone, with the bases on the inside. But here the stories diverge. According to The Double Helix, Franklin was unable to interpret her images properly and was unwilling to share them with others, to a point where Watson and Crick were forced to go around her to get at her data. According to Maddox, however, Franklin was perfectly capable of interpreting the X-ray images, although she was slow...
Franklin's life was short, but its epilogue has been long. Watson, Crick and Maurice Wilkins were awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1962. (Nobels are awarded only to living scientists, and Franklin died too early to share the glory.) In an uncharacteristically heartfelt afterword to The Double Helix, Watson admits that his "initial impressions of her, both scientific and personal...were often wrong." She has been the subject of two biographies, a BBC movie and numerous articles, all aimed at giving her the credit she was denied during her lifetime. In 2000, King's College christened...
...Second, most people thought it couldn't be solved by building models--they thought you needed to get the answer primarily from X-ray crystallography of DNA. Rosalind Franklin's made that mistake. But we said, "It worked for Linus Pauling when he solved the structure of the alpha helix, so why not for us?" Third, we had each other. It helps to have someone else to take over the thinking when you get frustrated. Fourth, we were willing to ask for help and talk to our competitors. Again, Rosalind was so intelligent that she rarely sought advice...